Adaptations Part Three: Games
What are your thoughts on your favorite game adaptation? What things were left out? Added in? Combined? Simplified? And if you helmed it, what would you have done?
Games are a medium that doesn't just have an audience, but players. The outcome is determined by what they do and how. And thus we wind up in tricky adaption territory where it seemed that at first no one knew what they heck to do.
Case in point: the 1993 Super Mario Brothers adaptation that left many people scratching their heads. The biggest game of its time, yet games didn't have really have a story beyond the manual, a few text screens and/or very simple cutscenes. Thus, this movie version REALLY filled in the blanks with a wild vision that's largely tangentially related to the source material. 30 years later, with plenty of experience and groundwork, The Super Mario Bros. Movie came out and it looked like the game.
However, in between we got all manner of adaptations from 1993's Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, or rival games with rival fiom adaptions. 2001's Tomb Raider and its sequel AND a 2018 reboot. The 2005 DooM movie and a non-sequitor sequel in 2019 Doom: Annihilation. The infamous slew of Uwe Boll's 2000s era adaptations: House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark, Bloodryane, Far Cry, and his biggest budget film, the adaption of Dungeon Siege.
Sega's Sonic was perhaps a wise latecomer who spawned a successful film series starting in 2020 after aforementioned experience and groundwork had been laid. Even largely plotless games, such as Need For Speed have film adaptations with the plot serving what the game is know for, racing. 2018's Rampage adapts an arcade classic with one of three playable monsters as the protagonist with the other two taking on antagonist roles, human characters have also been added.
Know any others? Drop your thoughts.
——Next week: the Oddball category…
